The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey Read Free Book Online Page B

said, “Ma,” but whether in compassion or in reproach Rosie couldn’t tell. Then the rector came in, and Barney, who was late, and the service began, during which she wept and wept, with Barney on one side of her and Peter on the other. She knew perfectly well she was weeping for her daughter as well as for her mother.
    Rosie hoped, desperately, that that was the last of Susannah, but she and Ivan apparently went straight from the church to Uncle Jim’s house, where they waited for him and Aunt Thelma to return from the funeral. They waited a good long time, too, because everyone went out for lunch afterward, and Uncle Jim had too many gin and tonics. It was late afternoon when they arrived home, but Susannah got out of him the name of her grandmother’s lawyer, and went to the reading of the will a few days later—she and Ivan staying in the meantime with some hippie friend of theirs in New Haven. Rosie could just picture the place: incense, waterbed, astrological charts, marijuana, roaches. She didn’t attend the will-reading, but Peter did, and he told her they left for California right after. “Tell Mom I said good-bye,” Susannah said to Peter, with stupefying chutzpah. Peter and Ivan had a talk about the Red Sox. Susannah spoke to Russ O’Dell, the lawyer, about how long they’d have to wait for the money. Not that they got much. The bulk of it went to Rosie, of course, with Peter’s small legacy and Susannah’s tiny one and a few to old friends and contributions to the National Trust and the New England Federation of Garden Clubs. But to a pair of California ne’er-do-wells it must have seemed like a fortune. Neither of them, they told Peter, was employed “at the moment.” The moment, Rosie suspected, was a long, persistent, improvident one, cushioned with food stamps, sweetened now with Grandma’s legacy. Rosie never reproached her mother for anything in her life, but after her death she clenched her fists and asked her mother’s memory: “Why? Why leave her anything? How could you?” And her mother’s sweet fairness, her blithe spirit, reached back from the grave in reproach.
    Peter came to Rosie’s for dinner on a snowy Tuesday evening. Rosie hadn’t seen him for a week or two, and her first impression of him when he came in and shook the snow off his camel-hair coat was something is different . He looked, somehow, not himself. Was he thinner? tired? What it was didn’t come to her until he was sitting in his favorite chair with a drink in his hand and the light from the fire illuminating one side of his face.
    â€œSo how’s it going, Ma?” he asked her, and she saw then that he was unhappy, the idle, affectionate question forced, his natural ebullience gone flat. And the ends of his mustache, unwaxed, drooped.
    â€œPeter dear, what is it?”
    He looked at her, startled, smiling, but Rosie knew she wasn’t mistaken; the smile was dredged up from murky depths. “What’s what?”
    She backtracked. It didn’t seem that many years ago that he and she had passed through his touchy, protracted adolescence. The wounds were barely healed. And yet, she remembered, even in the throes of teenage anguish—anguish that, in her son’s case, was made even more poignant by his then-unresolved sexual crisis—even in the midst of the sulks and late hours and slammed doors and mumbled apologies that characterized those difficult years, there had been a fizziness about Peter, an ability to enjoy life even when it went bad, that was now, Rosie realized with a shock, missing.
    â€œYou must be tired,” she said, giving him that for an out—the legendary fatigue of the graduate student working against time.
    To his credit, he didn’t take the out. He looked at her steadily, the strained smile gradually slipping away, and she felt a surge of joy. I’ve brought him up well , was how